Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One

Conventional wisdom would dictate that you can’t make a movie the way The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part One has been made and hope to make money. It’s a teen chick flick blended with tweaked art project re-visiting of female-focussed horror themes to do with birthing, of all things.

On the chick flick side, there’s a romantic marriage (Twilight novelist Stephanie Meyer cameos as a guest), complete with the same song that heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her creature of the night bit of trouser Edward (Robert Pattinson) danced to in the first Twilight film. Aw. There’s even the ego-boost of jealous spurned lunk Jacob the werewolf lurking in the background at the wedding flexing his six pack sulkily. There’s a honeymoon, at a surprise romantic location arranged by the besotted beau for his new bride. Said even beau carries his virginal bride across the threshold. Turns out, chivalry is undead.

So far, so teen-dream-supernatural-romance. But there’s also the stuff you maybe wouldn’t expect to find in a 12A rated film intended to make millions of dollars. The strangeness starts gently, with Edward and Bella absolutely wrecking their wedding bed, tearing apart the solid four-poster like it’s papier-mache, leaving Bella with visible bruises. Ok, this is all a bit OTT, but basically still part of the untrammelled passion fantasy. But then the weirder stuff starts to kick in, with a supernatural pregnancy literally ruining Bella from the inside out, her vampire baby starving her until she looks like someone stuck a pumpkin up Jack Skellington’s nightie. There’s also a sequence involving Wolf Vision TM that feels like the hallucinatory star gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey as observed by a camera strapped to a dog doing time trials at Crufts.

Let’s not spoil the bitey bitey c-section climax. And let’s definitely not even go there in terms of how certain werewolves feel about newborns. The film’s final scenes are arguably stranger in content than anything director Bill Condon (Kinsey, Gods And Monsters) has tackled before, and yet everything is played as if it’s an episode of Hollyoaks. And despite all this, this film will achieve a box-office bonus akin to the likes of sanded-down, focus-grouped, don’t-frighten-the-horses mega-hits. It’s a head scratcher.

Sure, in terms of graceful narrative development Twilight: Breaking Dawn is a soggy marsh punctuated by tussocks of emo-friendly conversation - the action scenes are a particular let down. But there’s still something vaguely heartening about a film with this much crazy crap in it appealing to millions of people. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers (or producers) didn’t fully commit to the body horror approach the script could easily have supported – and given that Twilight saga scriptwriter Melissa Rosenberg (who also cameos in the wedding scene) has episodes of TV series Dexter, The Outer Limits, and Dark Skies under her belt, you feel she could have gone even further in bringing the weirdness to the fore and leaving the soap opera behind. But perhaps then it just wouldn’t be Twilight.